maybe it meant something
If it weren’t for Hunter Thompson I wouldn’t have started IMing with someone calling himself Raoulduke on the network under the arches at Trinity College, Dublin. I wouldn’t have moved into that godawful apartment in Westland Row, and I wouldn’t have picked up my first copy of Wired Magazine during the Ireland-Norway game of the 1994 World Cup.
If I hadn’t read Wired I wouldn’t have taken the job at Computer Week when I got back to Sydney, so I wouldn’t have reconnected with Big Daddy G, then in his PR phase. And if I hadn’t made friends with him again, I wouldn’t have interviewed Jeremy for the Guava story or met Pesce in an Oxford Street bar.
If I hadn’t met Pesce, Jeremy and I wouldn’t have moved to San Francisco together. Raoulduke wouldn’t have introduced us to bos in Universal Cafe. We wouldn’t have gone to Burning Man and met the Santa Cruzers. We wouldn’t have gone to Orinda to meet Salome and Noah. We wouldn’t have held the chuppah at bos’ wedding to Mamafu. We wouldn’t have bought Eugenia Avenue or had Claire.
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a main era – -the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – -that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
